Bacchus

'Bacchus' is a sculpture of exceptional aesthetic quality which conveys a sense of expressive monumentality, despite being smaller than life-size.
Michael Rysbrack was extremely prolific throughout the nearly fifty years that he spent working in England for various patrons, notably the banker Henry Hoare II. 'Bacchus' was one of the banker’s many commissions for his villa at Stourhead in Wiltshire, which was completed in 1722 and is now a National Trust property. The sculpture, which was produced for the dining room of the main house, featured a pendant (a very popular custom in the eighteenth century) in the form of a faun playing the flute, an Italian-made copy of an antique statuette.
Of Dutch origin, Michael Rysbrack, who moved to London from Antwerp in 1720, made an important contribution to the revival of English sculpture in the second half of the eighteenth century. Inspired by the sculpture of Classical Antiquity, Rysbrack was an exemplary classical sculptor, refining the late-Baroque style in which he had trained in the city of his birth.